The Public Theater continues its 2019-2020 Off-Broadway season with the first major New York revival of Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day, directed by Oskar Eustis.
Performances are staged at the Public's Anspacher Theater.
(Photos by Joan Marcus)
This show has now closed. See our list of theatre tickets for shows currently on sale.
12 images Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, reunites with longtime collaborator and Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis in a scorching new version of his first play, the prescient 1985 masterwork suggesting the possibility of the Reagan counter-revolution eventually giving rise to American fascism. Agnes, an actress in Weimar Germany, and her cadre of passionate, progressive friends, are torn between protest, escape, and survival as the world they knew crumbles around them. Her story is interrupted by an American woman enraged by the cruelty of the Reagan administration, and a new character, grappling with the anxiety, distraction, hope, and hopelessness of an artist facing the once unthinkable rise of authoritarianism in modern America. Funny, brilliant, and devastating, this new production of A Bright Room Called Day revisits an epic work that takes a piercing look at the vulnerability of American democracy, and demands to know: when the devil takes up residence in your country…will you act?
A Bright Room Called Day, now at the Public Theater, first breathed life back in 1985. We know this because playwright Tony Kushner appears as a character in the story about 10 minutes in and tells us. Mind you, he is not identified as Kushner. He is not named anywhere except the program. He is Xillah (Jonathan Hadary), and presents himself as the author in a quandary. This is the play he... Read more
